Cameron says “you’re welcome”

Let’s begin by me saying, yet again, that Adam Levine is gross. Never been a fan of Maroon 5. Never found him attractive. Interviewed him a couple of years ago and it felt like I was expected to find him attractive. That he expected it from me. And I remember afterwards Dylan, whose male bullsh-t meter has always been uncannily accurate, immediately confirmed that he was a fraud. Also he always looks like he’s wearing foundation on his lips. Did you see Saturday Night Live?

So Cameron Diaz appeared during the monologue with Andy Samberg and Jerry Seinfeld and she was great -- fun and goofy and so essentially Cam, the hot girl guys want to hang out with. I was confused then as to why people were emailing me all ragey about her behaviour -- and particularly what she was doing with Adam Levine, like she was throwing herself at him. I had to watch the rest of it to get to the finale.

As you know, it’s customary at the end for the host, surrounded by the cast and the guests, to thank whoever he/she needs to thank. So here’s Adam thanking everyone, and now watch Cam:

She’s just being nice.

Or...

YOU’RE WELCOME -- is it synonymous here with LOOK AT ME and WANT ME PLEASE?

I can see it. Jacek can’t because he says he’s not a f-cking bitch. Emily, who is also not a f-cking bitch, doesn’t either. My friend Lo, on the other hand, spotted it right away. In her words: “desperado. Looks exactly like Zac Efron puppy-dogging Leonardo DiCaprio”. But she made an additional point -- maybe you only recognise it if you’ve been there. Maybe we’d interpret it differently if we could separate Cameron in these 20 seconds with the Cameron who’s been dicked around by dicks, A-Rod and Diddy, who jealously shouted down Justin Timberlake at a party because he started dating Jessica Biel -- the girl who cannot hold her sh-t together in love.

It’s unfair, isn’t it?

It’s like we Photo Assumption her all the time to her disadvantage.

But it wasn’t always this way, was it?

Cameron Diaz, as noted earlier in this post, was the “hot girl guys want to hang out with”. She’s athletic. She farted and burped and wasn’t afraid to be gross and also looked awesome in a bikini. Cam was cool. And she traded on that image for a long, long time.

At some point though we stopped seeing her like that. We stopped seeing her like that and we started seeing her like this:

So it’s a question of image deterioration, right? And, to make it even more insulting, it happened as she aged. How much of that then is what we’ve projected onto her based on the existing cultural expectations we have of women “of a certain age” and their behaviour, particularly if they are single and without children? And how much of it is reasonable speculation based on observation? It’s a discussion for the Faculty Of Celebrity Studies which, have I mentioned?, is coming back soon!

As for whether or not it happened with Levine -- here they all are arriving at the after-party and he was joined by his model girlfriend Behati Prinsloo so, no, it probably didn’t.